For actresses, director of Blue Is the Warmest Color,’ the love story is over

Friday

Nov 15, 2013 at 12:01 AM

LOS ANGELES — Passion. Triumph. Heartbreak. Betrayal. Renewal.

By Mark Olsen

LOS ANGELES — Passion. Triumph. Heartbreak. Betrayal. Renewal.

This describes not only the story told in “Blue Is the Warmest Color” but also in many ways the tempestuous, topsy-turvy saga the French film’s director and two lead actresses have themselves faced since the movie’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The film is an epic-length telling of a most intimate story. With a running time of nearly three hours and a story that spans some five years, the film explores the relationship between a young woman named Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who wants to be a schoolteacher, and the slightly older, more worldly aspiring artist Emma (Léa Seydoux). The two come together, fall in love and fall apart, with an emphasis on Adele’s burgeoning sense of self.

Adapted from a graphic novel by Julie Maroh (with a screenplay credited to director Abdellatif Kechiche and Ghalya Lacroix), the film is dense with themes and ideas on romance, personality, family, friendship, class and the power of erotic attraction to scramble the senses. Where Maroh’s source material is deeply concerned with how homosexuality is accepted in French society, Kechiche pushes the adaptation toward more universal ideas.

“Before anything else I wanted it to be a love story. My job as a director is not to make a statement about homosexuality but about these two characters and their profound love story,” said Kechiche in Los Angeles last month. “This is not a political statement, this is about two people loving. Anybody can identify with this, a man or a woman.”

The Tunisia-born, Paris-based Kechiche, 52, though perhaps little known in the United States, is a major director in France. His films “The Secret of the Grain” and “Games of Love and Chance” won best picture, director and screenplay at the Cesar awards, commonly referred to as France’s Oscars. Seydoux, 28, is a rising international star who has appeared in such English-language films as “Inglourious Basterds,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.” Exarchopoulos, 19, has played small roles in a number of films, including the recent American indie “I Used to Be Darker,” but this is her breakout role.

In an unusual move, Cannes’ prestigious top prize of the Palme d’Or, presented by a jury headed by Steven Spielberg, went not only to Kechiche, per tradition, but also to Seydoux and Exarchopoulos.

In the months since their unlikely triumph, though, the three have come to seem like a trio of former lovers who have shared something intense and now don’t quite know how to behave around one another.

At Cannes, the film’s graphic, extended sex scenes had critics buzzing, both pro and con. Maroh herself after the festival decried the depiction of lesbian lovemaking as “not convincing at all … ridiculous.”

Various controversies and intrigues, some overhyped, have followed. The film not surprisingly received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA as its American distributor, Sundance Selects, decided to release the film uncut. The film’s October release date in France, in place even before Cannes, put it outside the cutoff date to be eligible to be France’s submission for the 2014 foreign language Academy Award, prompting dismay from some awards watchers.

Things really began to break loose as the film hit the fall festival circuit. At the Telluride Film Festival, Seydoux and Exarchopoulos gave a widely quoted interview in which they called the experience of making the film “horrible” and declared they would not work with Kechiche again.

Days later in Los Angeles, the director refused to sit for a photo with the actresses and then angrily exploded during a solo press conference with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, with particular vitriol in his comments toward Seydoux. In her own solo HFPA appearance moments later, Seydoux broke down sobbing.

The accusations have since flowed back and forth, with interviews plus articles and tidbits from France being translated into English and given headlines aimed at maximum shock value.

“I think it would be cowardly to blame the press for things that were said and put out there. Now that they’ve been said, they’ve been said,” said Kechiche in early October during the New York Film Festival.

Much of the confusion and disagreement seems to stem from Kechiche’s working methods. In an extended preproduction process, he worked over the screenplay with the actresses, refining the characters to fit them. (Exarchopoulos’ character’s first name was changed from Clementine in the book to her own.) Then the production itself took on a free-form atmosphere, with the director pushing the performers during scenes while shooting upward of a hundred takes. Production stretched on for months, with the actresses saying the film’s major sex scene alone took 10 days to shoot.

In some ways the controversy that has followed “Blue” has reframed it as not just the explicit sex film it largely seemed to be from its reception at Cannes. Even as its principals struggle to reconcile their varying perspectives, their tension highlights the degree of passion and emotion as well as erotic intimacy in the movie.

“What can he say? Can he say it was not tough on us? When you see the film you see the truth,” said Seydoux. “It’s true that the process was extremely difficult, and I think Abdellatif is a very tortured man. And we suffered on the film.”

“But him too, I think,” added Exarchopoulos. “He doesn’t accept it. It’s very difficult for him to say, ‘Yes, it’s difficult.’ But the result is so, so great.”